Bewildering Stories introduces and welcomes...

Kathleen Williams Renk

Kathleen is a native of St. Louis, Missouri, and now lives on the Front Range in Colorado after retiring from an academic career in 2018. She has published short fiction, essays, poetry and several novels, which are mainly historical fiction. She is also an amateur musician.

“Dear Reader, I Didn’t Marry Him,” according to the author, pays homage to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and its “prequel,” Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. The author says she has been “obsessed by the Brontës” since she was a teenager. Readers will find that a knowledge of Jane Eyre can be very helpful but not absolutely necessary to understand “Dear Reader’s” take on subjects such as colonialism and feminism. The author succeeds in bringing to the enjoyment of modern readers a reflection on one of the most influential classics of 19th-century literature.

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A personal note from your Managing Editor: My mother told me, when I was about 10 years old, “You're related to the Brontë sisters. But don’t make a big deal of it; not everybody will understand.” Many years later, my sister, Jane, told me of her visit to the Prunty castle, in England. I congratulated her on undertaking the family pilgrimage and said I’d like to do the same. Jane said, in effect, “Oh, don’t bother; it’s a wreck.”

I have to smile: on one side of the family, an ancestor respelled the Irish name to make it pronounceable in French and exotic-looking in English, while his relatives emigrated to the mountain country of colonial Virginia. The Brontës became famous; some of their collateral relatives, at least, passed up a belated opportunity to become fracking plutocrats.

Kathleen Williams Renk’s bio sketch can be found here.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Kathleen. We’re glad to have you with us.